I take on A Clockwork Orange on The Auteurcast

Rudie Obias and West Anthony invited me on their podcast The Auteurcast, a show which picks out fascinating directors and discusses all their films one-by-one. I joined them during a Stanley Kubrick cycle. They would have had no way of knowing this — except due to sheer film-geek likelihood — but Kubrick counts among the first three or four directors I actually recognized as directors. (Now that I think about it, “directors you actually recognize as directors,” makes for as concisely accurate a definition of “auteur” as I’ve heard.) Going to screening after screening of Dr. Strangelove with my dad no doubt encouraged that.

But I didn’t discuss Dr. Strangelove, my most-viewed Kubrick film, with Rudie and West. Nor did we discuss Barry Lyndon, the Kubrick film I think about most often these days. We discussed A Clockwork Orange, of which I just so happened to catch a screening with Malcolm McDowell in attendance. (To name just one of the reasons I moved to Los Angeles.) We got into the distance between the film’s reality and that of 1960s England and the surprisingly enduring impact of non-explicit violence. You can listen to the show here. I remember taking a girlfriend, at age fifteen, to a double-bill of A Clockwork Orange and The Shining at Seattle’s Varsity Theater. I wonder where she is now. Well, not really.